UKPolitics

On a reality-based security strategy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

There is an observation amongst peace-campaigners that politicians claim that there is never enough money to spend on social welfare but those same politicians are always quick to find that same money when they need to spend it on war.

That trend appears to have been broken in the UK, but in the worst possible way. Now we’re being told that there isn’t enough money for the war either, and so the social welfare has to go to pay for it. The UK is aiming to spend £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid and Keir Starmer’s likely last major policy decision has been to announce an increase in the military budget by an extra £15 billion a year, funded by cuts to long term investments in transport and energy infrastructure as well as broader cuts across the board.

This will have multiple impacts on public spending. The first is the impact of the direct cuts, as mentioned. The second will be the knock-on effects on devolved government spending – investment in roads and to a lesser extent energy generates “Barnett Consequentials” which feed through to the Scottish budget but spending on defence does not. Every £1bn out of the transport budget and putting it into the military means an effective cut of £80mn to the Scottish budget. The third is that as a “job creation tool”, the military is a terrible means of economic stimulus. Yes, the military spending will create jobs, but spending £1bn on just about anything else – particularly things like energy infrastructure – would create even more jobs. It is likely that this defence plan will be net-negative for job growth. And that’s before we consider the final point – money spent on a bomb that isn’t used is a waste of money (even more so when we consider the wastefulness of military procurement). Money spent on a bomb that IS used, destroys the bomb and whatever (or whomever) it is dropped on. War as a negative sum game. Even the “winners” lose.

And this is all assuming that this is what the UK actually needs or should be doing right now. The problem with the discussions about what the UK defence sector is actually defending us from is woefully inadequate. Rare is the military chief who actually lays out the threats to the country and allows their spending to be democratically scrutinised. This is despite Lord George Robertson rather ironically saying in a Parliamentary evidence session this week that “if people become aware of the dangers and the risks to this country then they will make the demands that will allow us to do it.”

But if the military folk won’t tell us what they think those dangers and risks are then we’ll need to work it out for ourselves. Instead of building nukes to “defend” ourselves from shadows and the enemies they’d like to have, we need a reality-based security strategy.

The single most serious threat to the UK and our way of life is climate change. This is a self-inflicted problem and it is now too late to prevent but not too late to limit or to adapt to. But doing so will require investments in the kind of things that Starmer’s defence strategy will pull money away from at a critical time. It’s not just the climate itself, but Trump’s illegal war with Iran and Putin’s with Ukraine has shown the folly of relying on fossil fuels when we now have renewable alternatives that cannot be disrupted in the way those wars did to our fuel supplies. Opting out of being forced to fight oil wars is a much more sensible strategy than merely hoping we can win one.

Substantial domestic threats exist in the form of smuggling, criminal gangs, radicalised terrorists or fascists like the ones recently spotted outside Holyrood last week. These are all policing matters rather than military though. Cutting police budgets, social welfare and other community-based initiatives to funnel into war will make these problems worse, not better.

The same goes for non-climate environmental threats. If we wanted a reality-based security strategy to consider the number of British people killed each year then we’d be waging war against pollution. Recent data has shown that the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (which was opposed by the political right, including Starmer) has started to save around 3,000 lives per year (I haven’t been able to find comparable data for Glasgow or Edinburgh’s LEZ impacts yet). If a terrorist or hostile state killed 3,000 British civilians in a year, we know what the response would be. If a politician tried to win an election on the promise of murdering 3,000 people, I doubt they’d win a vote. And yet, there are politicians and political parties still claiming to want to roll back on urban LEZ legislation. A reality-based security strategy would treat that appropriately.

Next on the threat scale is probably something like Hybrid War – unconventional attacks on our infrastructure via things like hacking attempts and drone warfare. The UK has, in fact, experienced attacks like this from state actors – we now know that Russia was likely behind the shutdown of Jaguar Land Rover last year. We also know that Trump’s USA has been actively spying on European Governments, digitally sanctioning human rights lawyers, and is quite capable of ordering Microsoft to lock down Scotland’s ability to pass legislation should he choose to. The threat from this kind of hybrid war isn’t therefore coming only from our “enemies” and cannot be defended against by building more bombs to aim at them. A reality-based security strategy would be following the EU’s lead and developing a digital sovereignty strategy to remove the threat of such hacks from the table. Common Weal are actively working on what a Scottish digital strategy could look like.

“If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead.”

On the far side of the threat spectrum in terms of probability is actual territorial invasion which is vanishingly low for somewhere like Britain. The country being held up as a threat in this regard, Russia, has already shown the limits of its capabilities in Ukraine. It may well still be a threat on the borders of NATO, but that’s a very different prospect to the idea of seeing T-90 tank in Tottenham. Once again, when considering territorial invasion, we cannot ignore our supposed “ally” the USA, which is still threatening to annex Greenland. However, the thought does bring up the thing that has been absolutely missing from discourse on defence spending till now – time.

The new Starmer plan has a long time horizon. It will be years before the actual money starts to ramp up weapons production and development and decades before the results of that spending results in deployable equipment (this is particularly the case with things like nuclear weapons and new submarines to launch them). If we take as given that Putin’s Russia is the massive overbearing threat that the establishment would have us fear, then we have to remember that Putin himself is mortal and already past UK state retirement age. He will quite likely be dead or otherwise no longer in power before any of Starmer’s new weapons can be aimed at him. Who will replace him? What can the UK and Europe do now to normalise relations with his successor so that post-Putin Russia is not a threat? Would doing that be cheaper than us threatening to nuke Moscow, murdering 5 million civilians in the process? Might it work better?

Pacifists like myself are never listened to in times of peace. In times of war, we are openly scorned as not having the solutions to the conflict that could have been avoided had we been listened to in times of peace. Warmongers need war and the threat of war to justify their own existence and to bloat their already unjustifiable budgets and they must be called out on this fact. If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead. If we want a strategy that results in actual security, we must deal with the reality we have, not the one the warmongers would prefer we were afraid of instead.

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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Buried under the higher profile news that the UK is embarking on a new push of ever-greater militarism – aiming to spend more than twice as much than it used to on the military and aiming to spend more than £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid – is a new goal of further discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees, including those driven to flee their countries to the UK due to the UK’s own policies of spending more on war and less on aid.

The new plan is that there will be an additional tax placed on refugees who have had their asylum claim accepted that will see them bear a completely arbitrary debt of £10,000 to be paid back after they start working and earning and with any future application for indefinite leave to remain or citizenship blocked until the debt is paid.

Let’s start with the language used in the reporting around this. The policy is said to target “people granted asylum”. We have a word for people who have claimed asylum, found to have a valid claim and then asylum granted on that basis. They are refugees. This is important. Such is the dismal state of the public discussion around migration that far too many people hear the word “asylum seeker” in a manner that rhymes with “illegal migrant” and this is starting to bleed into the rhetoric on legal migrants too. There are politicians in Parliament right now who have made statements that would, if they became policies, would make it difficult or even impossible for my family to remain in this country safely.

Rather than resist the extremes of the right in the UK, the current Labour Government seems to be chasing them instead.

The full announcement of the proposed changes to asylum are here and do go beyond just that additional and arbitrary tax on migrants. Other punitive policies include significantly narrowing the definition of “family” for the purposes of human rights protections (did you flee a country with an uncle who is your only surviving relative after the war? You’re no longer “family” in the eyes of the UK Government), making it easier to subject people to slavery if they’ve found themselves with even a short custodial sentence in the UK (perhaps even due to a crime commit at the compulsion of their enslaver?) and by introducing a “legal route” to asylum that can only take place via individuals or organisations “sponsoring” a claimant which will almost certainly mean that those without the power to win a sponsor will be least able to claim asylum that they need.

There have also been proposals for annual caps on the number of admissions meaning that if you seek asylum then your ability to reach safety might depend on your arriving in June rather than in August. Welcome to Refugee Hunger Games, currently accepting applications from Districts Three through Six exclusively. Applicants from all other Districts, better luck next year!

Separately from this announcement, the UK is now also planning to bring in “age-verification technology” that they already know, from testing it, will result in children being falsely classified as adults and being stripped of their asylum rights. They also know that the tech is worse at distinguishing children from adults when the subject is Sub-Sarahan African compared to Eastern European and if they are female rather than male so this means that they are planning to bring in this tool despite knowing that it contains inbuilt, systemic racial and gender biases.

“Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee.”

Back on the £10k “success” fee for asylum seekers who become refugees. The fee itself appears to be arbitrary and only tangentially linked to the costs of supporting someone during their asylum process. That process itself can be entirely variable depending on whether someone is housed in a social house within a community, in a military barracks or in a privately run hotel that is squeezing the government and its residents for maximum profit extraction. It also entirely depends on the length of time it takes to process an application. The cuts to the Home Office over many years (likely to get worse now that Starmer is asking for even more cuts to public services to fund his expansion to the military) mean that the rising number of asylum seekers in the UK right now has as much to do with the failure to promptly process their cases and convert them to refugee status as it does with the number of people arriving. It would be entirely unfair to put the burden of “paying” for the extra costs of a service if the delays that increase those costs are due to the government, not the person.

If the £10k figure has been arrived at as a kind of average cost per applicant across all applicants though then it serves as a tacit admission from the Government that the actual cost of the asylum process is relatively small. The reporting says that the total cost of the asylum system is about £4bn per year (and this sum is likely to rapidly decline in coming years as we come off the peak of the last spike in claimants). Starmer casually announced this week that he wants to add almost four times that to the military budget. If the entire burden of these costs were placed on income tax payers alone (they aren’t. Income tax isn’t the sole tax in the UK) then this would mean that, on average, an income tax payer would see about £120 a year of their income tax go towards supporting asylum seekers and about £450 go towards Starmer’s military budget increase (on top of what is already being spent on war).

Not that the £10k repayment will actually save the Government or taxpayers any money. The Home Office’s own policy and financial assessment says as much – and their assessment of the stripping of slavery protections are likely to cost more money than they save due to the inevitably successful lawsuits.

If the problem of asylum seeking is that it costs too much money per seeker (and assuming that the problem isn’t actually that Centrist politicians are afraid of right-wing competitors courting racism and dividing society against marginalised groups) then there is a much, much better way to allow asylum seekers to support themselves while waiting on the Home Office to get its act together and that is to remove the prohibition that prevent asylum seekers from working. If people can support themselves and their own accommodation then the Government doesn’t need to spend so much money housing people in barracks or hotels.

Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee. It’s not just being married to an immigrant that brings this fact close to home for me. If you are a donor to Common Weal (if you are not and would like to, you can sign up here) then you pay me to agitate against the state. Our support for Scottish Independence is not just a political position. In some countries, doing what I do for Common Weal would be illegally promoting sedition and would be punishable with anything up to lengthy prison sentences or even capital punishment. I am literally only a bad government away from having to seek political asylum too.

This is why I’m so strident on human rights more generally. You cannot limit rights for one human without limiting them for every human. The UK is travelling a very dark path by playing the game set by right wing extremists. It only ever leads to an end where some people are declared to be less human than other humans, or to not really be human at all.

Workers aren’t lazy; they’re being left behind

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. – Bertrand Russell

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

You will probably know the story right now. That the way to get the UK’s economy growing is to get more people working. And the reason that they’re not working is because a bunch of young people are lazy, feckless and that people are faking mental illness to avoid work and sponge off the benefits system. Claims that the benefit bill now exceeds income tax revenue are flowing around right-wing media outlets to try to delegitimise the entire social security system.

The problem with the story is that much of it is flat out false and most of the rest is misleading to the point of meaninglessness.

To take that last claim head-on, Full Fact did a thorough debunking of it. The total UK social security ‘bill’ has been higher than income tax revenue for quite some time now, but even that point is utterly irrelevant. Income tax is not the only tax paid as a result of wages, National Insurance is too. So even if the benefit bill was only paid for out of direct taxation on worker wages, the claim would be false. But even that idea is itself wrong.

Direct income taxes aren’t hypothecated to pay for social security (not even National Insurance which only sits in a separate pot for historical reasons – all UK public spending comes out of the general Consolidated Fund). Saying that benefits are unsustainable because they cost the country more than it receives in income tax is precisely as illogical as saying that the UK’s military budget is unsustainable because it costs more than revenue from landfill taxes. National budgeting simply does not work like that (I’ll go into the MMT model of how national public budgeting for a currency-sovereign nation actually works another time).

The argument itself begs an important question. If the claim was true – what would its right-wing promoters want to do about it? ‘Cut benefits’, sure, but which ones? The state pension? Anything they personally claim? What kind of world do they think they would create if they ‘won’?

A similar story emerges when looking at young workers. A lot of newspaper lines have been written about unemployed people and feckless ‘NEETs’ who are neither working nor seeking work. To fix the economy, we’re told, those people need to be starved into working via benefits cuts.

Never mind that it won’t work (plenty of data shows that a Universal Basic Income – giving poor unemployed people more money, not less, is the key to improving life chances by allowing people to work under less duress or to improve their prospects through education and training rather than taking the only job that lets them eat tonight).

A large number of people who are ‘NEET’ are people who no reasonable person thinks should be told to drop what they’re doing and go work. The vast majority (in order of size of group) have a long term illness, are students, care for someone, or are retired while younger than state pension age.

What we’re actually seeing among vulnerable workers is a ladder being pulled away from them. There are currently approximately 700,000 job vacancies across the UK. There are approximately 1.8 million people currently unemployed (plus another million who are NEET). This means that there are about 2.5 people actively looking for work for every posted vacancy. This number rises to four people per job if you force the NEETs out to work regardless of their circumstances.

Those two numbers don’t equally divide into each other either. Employment isn’t fungible. A newly redundant senior civil servant isn’t going to take an entry level cafe job if they can help it. A newly graduated student isn’t going to walk into the vacancy left behind by the civil servant. Neither are going to think a job in Kent is going to be worth much to them if they both live in Inverness and can’t or don’t want to move. At some point this kind of ‘structural unemployment’ starts to matter more than the ‘frictional unemployment’ that happens when, for example, the laser engineer I used to be moves from one laser company to another.

“Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life.”

This means that it’s simply not a matter of cutting benefits till people squeak and go get a job if the job doesn’t exist for them to get.

And it’s about to get worse, especially for young workers. The latest figures show that not only are posted job vacancies not there, the number of jobs in the economy may be shrinking – around 100,000 jobs were lost in April this year, mostly in sectors like retail and food services. This paints a picture of households starting to cut back on eating out or even on how much they are buying as an economic system rocked by global instability starts to bite.

It’s not just the poor who need more money, it’s everyone else too – at least insofar as the current economic structure is concerned. If politicians want a growing economy based on consumerism, then they are going to need more consumers (immigration rates are falling again and the number of births and deaths in the UK is already nearly net-zero…) and those consumers are going to need more money to spend on consumption. This model of economics simply is not working and is about to come right off the rails even before the impacts of the Iran war and the rise of AI really start feeding through.

Common Weal will soon be publishing a new report looking in detail at the state of income and inequality in Scotland and the results are shocking but one of the most shocking results is the extent to which households fall below not the official poverty line but the line of a ‘minimum decent standard of living’. Even relatively well off households are struggling to raise kids to a decent standard. Beyond this paper we’re going to have to look at how we can pull even those households up not just through better jobs and more income but by changing the way the economy works.

If you can’t afford to buy books, it shouldn’t matter because we have more libraries. Your house should be a decent home at a decent price, not a leaking mould trap that your landlord is profiting from. And the basic infrastructure of your life, like energy, should be there to support you, not pad the profits of the shareholders of the equity funds that own your energy supplier.

Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life. What we actually bought was hard work without the reward while still being blamed for not working hard enough by those who got the reward without even having to do the work.

This says that the entire game is rigged against us. Perhaps it’s time to play a different game.

If energy powers get devolved – what then?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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John Swinney has kicked of the election campaign with promise that should he be returned as First Minister then “on the first day” he’ll submit a Section 30 order to the UK Government to request the devolution of energy powers to Scotland.

I want to make something clear from the outset – Scotland should have more powers over energy and, given that Scotland holds a massively substantial share of the UK’s total renewable energy resources – the powers that do remain reserved should be jointly managed to a much greater degree than they are now.

The current bickering and grandstanding between governments combined with the, frankly, whining from either government that the other government is blocking progress as they see it serves none of us at a time when first the climate emergency and now escalating geopolitical turmoil is demanding that we get ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. To that extent, a campaign for more devolved powers is not just welcome, but vital.

This is not to say that I believe that a simple call for those powers via a Section 30 order will be successful. I don’t think it will be, for the same reason that the Section 30 order for independence referendum powers almost a decade ago was not successful. Governments and politicians will only do something that they do not want to do when the consequences of not doing so – as they see and feel them – are worse than the consequences of acquiescing. If they are told to do something and there is no credible answer to the inevitable response “or what?”, then they won’t.

But let’s assume that they do. Let’s imagine a scenario after May where the Scottish Government clearly won’t win a campaign for a second independence referendum (which would inevitably absorb all other campaign energy and would, if successful, win the powers over energy anyway) but there is scope to win a “more devolution” campaign, including or centred around energy. It might well come about due to the SNP failing to win a majority of seats in Holyrood (and thus failing in their self-imposed prerequisite for an indyref campaign) but there nonetheless being a strong pro-independence majority in Parliament coupled with voices on the other side who don’t favour independence but would welcome more powers over energy (so…not much different from the recent outgoing Parliament then?).

What then?

The powers over energy get devolved to Holyrood, but what then? What is the plan for using those powers? here

I know what Common Weal would do with them. We’ve written extensively on energy matters for over a decade now and have pulled in expertise from some of the top people in the field. We have papers on how to reform the Grid written by people who have helped to run national grids. We have papers on how to heat homes, written by people who have helping to define the standards by which home energy needs are measured. We understand that trying to decarbonise the economy we have today without fundamentally changing that economy is doomed to failure.

So we have our own answers to the question of what we’d do with devolved energy powers and you can hear about a few more of them in my recent interview on the Scottish Independence Podcast here and below.

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I’m not convinced that the present Scottish Government has fully thought their answer to that question through though. From what I can see there are promises of energy price cuts without elaboration as to how it’d happen, there’s a manufacturing sector based almost entirely around inwards investment – though the UK’s blocking of the Ming Yang wind turbine factory on “national security” grounds (read: “we didn’t want to upset Daddy Trump”) is appalling – and there remains the continued risk that vital improvements like the proposed PassivHaus energy efficiency standards will get watered down and compromised by people who profit massively from your heating bill.

I am greatly concerned that the current Scottish Government’s plan, such that it is, will not be the overhaul of the energy sector that it needs. It won’t be based around bringing the sector into public ownership. I suspect this because they haven’t used the powers they currently have to bring much of it into public ownership.

They’ve also made efforts to privatise energy infrastructure that was in public ownership for no reason other than it would boost the “inwards investment” line a bit more – Scotland’s ‘public’ electric car charging network is now operated by an Austrian company. The Government also reviewed policies around community benefit fund recommendations and chose to reduce them in real terms compared to when they were first launched. And, of course, we’ve seen what happened with Scotland’s largest auction of offshore energy options where it’s very possible that the Scottish Government left many billions of pounds on the table due to undervaluing those assets.

As of the time of writing, we’ve yet to see the manifestos of most of the political parties (including the SNP) ahead of the elections next month but on this topic I’ll be paying particularly close attention. It’s simply not enough to call for more powers but to not lay out what to do with them and I am concerned that what the parties would do with them would just perpetuate the rip-off that the energy sector is. Powers must be used with purpose and that purpose should be not to serve the already wealthy and powerful, but All of Us.

A regulated economy is one that works for all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“They’ll re-regulate within ten years. There’ll be a string of crashes, and they’ll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don’t provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me, they will.” – Michael Crichton

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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It was a sombre weekend for me last week. The fire at Union Street in Glasgow hit me hard. I know it was by far not the worst disaster happening even at that moment – as Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war spread burning oil rains over Tehran in a manner that would surely be an example of a prosecutable offence under the proposed Scottish Ecocide Bill on top of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But still, that corner of Union Street was Common Weal’s office for several years and I realised that I’m the only member of the team remaining who worked in it on a daily basis (Robin had always habitually worked from home even before the Covid pandemic pushed the rest of us to do it too) and so the pang of personal connection was particularly strong.

As one of our Daily Briefings said this week, there are a lot of questions to be asked about the cause of the fire and many that may never be answered. If early reports are accurate though, it may well be that the vape shop where it started was not properly following business regulations and, simultaneously, the regulations around shops that sell highly addictive and highly flammable substances like vapes is nowhere near strong enough given the risks that the devices pose.

(By the way, if you are subscribed to Common Weal’s weekly Magazine but not yet subscribed to our Daily Briefing newsletter then you’re missing out. Every weekday we’ll send you our take on a news story that caught our eye that morning – one that you may not have noticed or may not have clocked the particular significance of from a Common Weal focus. Subscribe to the Daily Briefings for free here. And if you like it, please consider sending us a wee donation to help us keep it going.)

There are going to be questions in the coming weeks, months and possibly as part of the upcoming Scottish Parliamentary elections about how to better regulate these shops specifically. Even the Reform Party is calling for a review of regulations and they have usually been a party ideologically wedded to the idea that “cutting red tape” is the way to boost the economy.

And this is perhaps the core of the issue. The call for more or fewer regulations in anything from businesses, through banking, to regulations over cross-border food imports and exports, or even the regulation of government itself, appears to run like a swinging pendulum. When things are going fine, people think that the regulations are holding them back and call for the red tape to be cut. We become complacent and perhaps forget that the problems the regulations prevent ever even existed – almost like living in a world where people call for cuts to the fire service because it’s been years since they saw a building burn down.

When things crash (as they so, so often do) people wonder why the regulations didn’t save them and want more to prevent the causes of the previous crash happening again. This works until a different crash blindsides everyone who wasn’t listening to the folk who were warning about it, or folk start to feel safe and start talking about cutting red tape again.

There’s another aspect of regulation that sits underneath that broad cycle of tying up and cutting the red tape and that’s our willingness to enforce the regulations that do exist. This, too, could run from vape shops not being checked to make sure they are registered out to ensuring that the food being imported into the country are actually being checked to make sure they are meeting agreed standards rather than just being ‘waved through’ because there just aren’t the resources there to properly secure the border.

A regulation that isn’t enforced is even worse than one that doesn’t exist because it’s often not never enforced but instead merely enforced selectively. Which means enforced for us, but not those with the money or the power or the “too big to fail” scale to avoid having to play by trivialities like “the rules”.

“We can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business.”

Common Weal has been working on a broad group of policies around the topic of governance – mostly focus at Government itself but this all applies everywhere too. One of the foundational principles is that “no-one should govern themselves”. This means that government isn’t allowed to vote against transparency measures under the excuse that the mandatory rules merely replicate voluntary rules that they’re not following.

It means that the boards that are supposed to govern our regulatory bodies can’t be solely conscripted from the ranks of the bodies they are supposed to be regulating. It means that conflicts of interest must be rooted out and it means that lobbyists who advocate for changes to or immunity from regulations must do so in plain site of our democracy – we now argue that the Lobbying Register is insufficient and that ALL lobbying meetings with the Government (even ours) should be recorded and posted for public scrutiny.

And when it comes to regulation of the private sector, we can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business. There needs to be adequate deterrent and punishment for those responsible for failure that doesn’t just take the form of a fine that is smaller than the cleanup costs. That way lies the principle of CATNAP – Cheapest Available Technology, Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution – where companies don’t even just barely meet what regulations there are but happily sell us illegal products from unsafe vapes to unsafe houses knowing that no-one is about to stop them from doing so.

It’s said that “every rule is written in blood” and this is very much true when it comes to regulatory practices and especially with health and safety. Those who break out the scissors must be able to articulate why those rules came about and what they were designed to protect us from before being allowed to start cutting or even to just stop enforcing what we have – especially in the name of profit.

Otherwise, when the pendulum swings again, the blood that the next set of rules will be written in might well be our own.

 

We Are All Human, Or None Of Us Are.

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” – John F. Kennedy

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The UK is slipping even further into a dark, dark place. Let’s just be clear from the outset: once you declare someone, anyone, as not worthy of human rights you are declaring them to not be worthy as humans. And once you declare someone, anyone, as not being a worthy human, you might be next. Human rights apply to all of us, or to none of us.

Watching Nigel Farage spend a day of unrelenting media coverage this week to show off his latest idea of stripping migrants of their human rights and putting them in concentration camps was sicking. Worse, was seeing Keir Starmer’s response which was basically “we’ll do it too, but better”.

Then we got treated to a second day of it as former Conservative MSP Graham Simpson defected and attracted all of the airwaves to Farage again, followed for a third day by another defection in the form of former Labour Councillor Audrey Dempsey. Make no mistake. If you thought that was merely a coincidence, then you missed the deliberate strategy there.

Farage’s proposal is to follow a decade-long Conservative shibboleth of declaring that those “foreign courts” in Europe who safeguard our human rights via the European Convention on Human Rights are the worst kind of evil and the UK needs to withdraw from it. He’ll put in its place a “British Bill of Rights” that will apply only to British citizens and instead of “the state” telling you what you can do, you’ll have the freedom to do anything unless the state says you can’t do it.

One of the things he wants to do is to round up Afghan nationals who collaborated with the British armed forces during the invasion and occupation of that country. Many of these people now live under the threat of torture and execution by the Taliban since the latter reconquered the country and took back control. Many of these people had their personal details of their involvement with British forces leaked due to the UK’s appalling data security. Some received emergency evacuation. Some, it seems, did not.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban themselves appear to be quite happy to “receive” these people if Farage gets to implement his plans. When asked about whether he’d do it too Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, said, effectively, ‘we’re not taking that option off the table’.

Removing the UK from the ECHR is not going to be as easy as waving a legislative wand. The rights bill is baked into the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and can only be amended with the agreement of Ireland. Farage’s entire plan can be vetoed with a single memo containing the word “No”.

Or Northern Ireland could leave the UK, which would considerably smooth the passage of his plan. There’s still a complication in that ECHR is also baked into the Scotland Act and thus any attempt to disapply it to devolved areas in Scotland would require a legislative consent motion. But as Brexit has shown, this can simply be overridden by a Farage (or Starmer) Government. Or they could unilaterally amend the Scotland Act directly. Devolution will be no protection for Scotland in the way that it is for Northern Ireland.

“My partner is a migrant and is not a UK citizen nor likely to become one. Whenever someone says “prioritising British citizens”, they mean deprioritising and delegitimising my family.”

Even if the “British Bill of Rights” contains a carbon copy of the ECHR and it remains applying to everyone in general (i.e. Farage isn’t allowed to disapply it to Irish, Commonwealth, EU or non-EU citizens as he’s hinted) then we still have to remember that the actual purpose of doing this is to disapply it to specific people in specific instances whenever they become a nuisance to The State.

We’ve long been fed lines of the “bad person” who is “abusing human rights law” to avoid deportation for flimsy reasons like their cat is sick or they’d miss chicken nuggets (the actual stories behind those propaganda lines are far more nuanced). The point is that if such a person existed, these radicalised factions within the UK want to declare them less-than-human and to punish them for it.

This all matters because, sooner or later, it may well affect you. It’s certainly already affecting me. My partner is a migrant and is not a UK citizen nor likely to become one. Whenever someone says “prioritising British citizens”, they mean deprioritising and delegitimising my family. We also have to remember that I don’t just support Scottish independence, I work for an activist organisation that advocates for it. I am paid to agitate against the State in support of secession. In some countries, that’s not a job – it’s a death penalty offence. It might be me they strip citizenship from and declare to be unworthy of human rights.

Which, of course, means it might be you too. Or it might be Nigel Farage. Because even he is only a lost election and a charge of “collaboration with the previous regime” away from seeing his human rights abused too. As the famous line from the play A Man for All Seasons goes: “If you cut down the laws, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

Human rights must apply to all of us or they apply to none of us. So I would ask Farage (and Starmer, and any other MP tempted to support this idea) a question: Please look through the rights guaranteed by the ECHR. Which rights do you wish would no longer apply to you, personally?

Because if he gets his way, one day they might not.

So You’ve Won Capitalism: An Open Letter To The Billionaires

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.” – Jerry Ash

This blog post previously appeared in The National.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

a bird's eye view of a beachfront home

Dear Billionaires,

I think we can all agree that you’ve won Capitalism. If the goal of Capitalism is to accumulate wealth via the canny deployment of capital (yours or someone else’s) for the purpose of spending that wealth on goods and services to improve your own lifestyle then you have been successful beyond measure. As a billionaire, you now possess more wealth than can be reasonably spent by any individual in a lifetime. In fact, you passed that measure a long, long time ago.

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How to Launch a Scottish Wealth Tax

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” – Eugene V. Debs

This blog post previously appeared in The National.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

person holding fan of us dollar bill

(Image Source: Unsplash)

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. This used to be the core credo of parties of the Left – particularly the Labour Party in Britain – but it appears to have been eroded to the point of meaninglessness. Wealth inequality is increasing at an unimaginable rate and is currently substantially higher than income inequality. The rich are taking from all of us far more than they need and are giving back far less than what they are able to. This is a self-reinforcing problem such as where people who were able to buy houses when they were cheap (perhaps during Thatcher’s Right to Buy demolition of the social housing sector) became able to rent them out at ever increasing rates to people who can’t now afford to save the deposit to buy a house because house prices are rising faster than they can save due to the amount they have to spend on rent. Even the Office of Budget Responsibility is now warning (as I did several years ago in my book All of Our Futures) of the fiscal risks looming due to the number of people still privately renting when they retire and who will simultaneously be unable to afford to keep paying those rents and won’t have any capital saved in their house to subsidise their inadequate state pensions.

It’s not for no reason that the British public are increasingly demanding that the UK Government brings in a wealth tax to rebalance our increasingly unstable economy. I will say that there are good reasons for the UK to not bring in “a wealth tax” – by which I mean a single annual payment calculated as a certain percentage of the value of all of the assets and possessions that you own. Prof. Richard Murphy has articulated many of them well. It’s hard to value those possessions. Easy to hide them. And there are other taxes that the UK could use – such as reforms to taxes on stocks, shares, pensions and capital gains – that would achieve much of the same result. Not that the UK Government is going to do any of that either unless the pressure escalates to the point that the impossible becomes inevitable.

Let’s say, however, that the Scottish Government wants to take the first step. Could we do it here instead of waiting for the UK?

The patterns of wealth ownership in Scotland are substantially different than in the UK (particularly in London and the South East). We don’t have quite as many financial billionaires floating about the place. We don’t have as much wealth in stocks and shares – mostly because we don’t have a stock exchange in Scotland any more. Our generally lower rates of pay mean comparatively lower rates of wealth stored in pensions. There are, however, two sectors in Scotland where wealth is substantially stored and which could be taxed using devolved tax powers – Land and buildings.

Scotland already has its Land and Buildings Transaction Tax but despite the Scottish Greens seeking to apply what they called a “mansion tax” to it this would remain merely a surcharge on the transfer of assets, not a wealth tax applied to the holding of them. If you never bought another mansion, you’d never pay the mansion tax.

Council Tax is the most outdated and badly broken tax Scotland still insists on inflicting on the poor. The Scottish Government has stated that they’re not even going to think about reforming it until the end of this decade. This is completely unacceptable, especially as the solution is obvious. We need to scrap Council Tax and replace it with a tax based on a percentage of the present market value of the property. Common Weal argued that a rate of 0.63% would have been revenue neutral compared to Council Tax at the time we published the paper. That number could be recalculated now but we estimated then that a “revenue neutral” rate would actually mean a tax cut for eight out of 10 households as the burden of paying the tax would be placed more fairly on those who lived in the most expensive houses. We calculated that the “break even” point then would have been a house worth something like £400,000. This is based one a flat rate of tax too. We would argue that Councils should have the power to add progressive rates on extremely valuable properties like £1mn+ mansions or, as is the case with the current Council Tax, additional multipliers for multiple home ownership.

This would immediately act as a wealth tax both on the most expensive properties but also on multiple property ownership. Unlike Council Tax that is paid by occupants, our Property Tax would be paid by property owners and they could only pass on to their tenants the basic rate of tax. Landlords would have to pay any multiple ownership surcharges themselves.

The second wealth store in Scotland – land – is probably the greatest store of almost untaxed wealth in the country. Many countries tax the ownership of land as a distinct tax from properties built on it (sometimes because of local democracy, for example you might pay the land tax to your municipal government and your property tax to your regional government) but in Scotland there may be good reason to not do that but to simply extend the Property Tax to cover not just the land under and around your mansion but also the broader estate you own with it. Given that the two are often sold together, this will be much easier to put a price on than trying to calculate a separate Land Value Tax. We’ve estimated that doing this at the same flat rate as the Property Tax would bring in around £450 million a year in revenue – though this could be adjusted down to account for subsidies for small farms or up to better tax the 422 people who own half of Scotland.

One of the major advantages of both of these taxes – one that negates objections from both the UK and Scottish Government whenever taxes on the wealth have been suggested – is that it completely bypasses the idea that the rich will simply leave the country. Recent studies have shown that the idea of “millionaire flight” basically isn’t a thing (it’s not just a huge logistical hassle for comparatively little financial gain to pack everything up to go and live in a tax haven, even millionaires have friends and family as do their kids and tearing up those social bonds to save a bit of money just isn’t worth it) but this hasn’t stopped the media pushing that line anyway. Even if it was true, the wealth they have locked up in Scottish land and housing can’t move with them. The tax still needs to be paid by whomever owns them regardless of where they live (and many of the largest landowners in Scotland already don’t live here so the point is particularly moot there).

One of the biggest sources of instability in our current society and economy is wealth inequality. It urgently needs to be reigned in and reversed. If the UK Government persists in refusing to do it then there is at least something that the Scottish Government can do without having to wait for them. And if the current Scottish Government doesn’t want to do it either well, there are elections next year. Maybe politicians could suggest who we should vote for who will?

What Scottish Independence Could Deliver For The Welfare State

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.” – Marcus Aurelius

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Back in the early days of Common Weal, while we were still finding our feet and building our reputation, we had an informal rule when it came to policy-making. We had to be able to show the policy working somewhere else.

This was because we felt that Scotland simply wasn’t ready for some of the radical ideas that we wanted to implement so being able to show it already working was a good way of building confidence in a nation too often told “we cannae dae it” (by which our opponents often mean “we shouldnae dae it” which is a different thing entirely).

We’ve since dispensed with that rule and we sometimes broke it even then (one of Common Weal’s very first policy papers, “In Place Of Anxiety”, was an advocacy for Universal Basic Income (UBI) long before it became one of the “cool” policies) but this isn’t to say that we can’t learn lessons from elsewhere.

Just this week, I was asked by a researcher which of our neighbour nations I’d like Scotland to copy if I could. My answer was that we shouldn’t copy any one but that I take a lot of inspiration from Germany on local democracy, from Denmark on energy strategy and from Norway for public ownership. Somewhere else we could do with taking inspiration from our neighbours is on social security.

The scenes this week from the UK’s attempts to hammer the poor and disabled and only backing down after shambolic chaos in the Parliament should be a lesson not just in humanity but in policy-making as well. Never fight a battle you haven’t won in advance. Never assume a large on-paper majority means certain absolute power.

With many of our neighbours basing their politics on proportional representation and coalition politics, this kind of legislation would have undergone a lot of negotiation and compromise long before arriving at the voting chamber.

The way that many of our neighbours deal with the issue of social security is markedly different from the UK in several ways. The first is that the systems are a lot more generous in general. Norway, Denmark and Sweden rank in the top three OECD nations for spending on disability protections at above 3% of GDP while the UK is well below the OECD average at less than 2%.

Many more social securities like unemployment protections follow a different model from the UK when they are calculated. In particular, instead of the flat rate paid under the UK’s Universal Credit, many countries follow a model where the protection you receive is based on a percentage of your previous income.

There are consequences to each of these models. A flat rate tends to be more redistributive if it is generous enough (which Universal Credit isn’t) whereas a proportional rate tends to be less disruptive to an individual who is already going through the shock of losing their job while still having bills to pay.

We’ve seen these impacts in the UK too. During the pandemic, the Covid furlough scheme was paid at a proportional rate to people who were employed but was often paid at a flat Universal Credit rate to self-employed people. This exposed a lot of people who were previously on the side of denigrating poor and vulnerable people as lazy slackers to just how meagre and cruel the UK “benefits” system is.

We had an opportunity then to get some serious change off the back of that and maybe we still see echoes of it in this week’s chaos but largely the Powers That Be wanted to make us forget that moment of reflection as quickly as possible.

On the other side and as tempting as it might be to copy a European-style unemployment insurance based on previous income, and as beneficial that would be to people in well-paid but otherwise insecure jobs, we have to remember that many people are not in well-paid jobs and that wage suppression has been rife in the UK for decades. Receiving 60% of your previous income when you were being paid poverty wages won’t protect you from poverty in unemployment.

So maybe rather than Scotland – particularly an independent Scotland – copying existing social security policies from our neighbours, we need to look to them for inspiration in another way and look back at that paper I mentioned at the start of this column.

Last year, the EU think tank the Coppieters Foundation published a paper called “A European Universal Basic Income” which found that a UBI sufficient to eradicate poverty across the entire union could be entirely paid for by relatively modest changes to income tax and the savings found from the reduction of poverty itself.

Its model called for a UBI of €6,857 per year for adults and half that for children under 14. This is the equivalent of £113 per week for adults and £57 per week for children. The paper claimed that the increase in income taxes to pay for this level of UBI would themselves be relatively modest and the “breakeven” point for people who’d pay more income tax than they’d receive in UBI would be at around the 80th percentile.

In other words, eight out of 10 people would be directly better off with the UBI. And, to repeat, while this is still a relatively small sum per person if you have no other income, it would be enough to eradicate poverty across the entire EU and would be cheaper overall – after the health, crime and social inequality costs of poverty are factored in – than the current systems.

When this paper came out I argued that this meant a UBI was now a moral imperative because it was cheaper than the cost of poverty, but there’s clearly a financial imperative too. Whether we’re discussing an independent Scotland seeking to create a better country for all of us or even just a cynical UK trying to save money in the face of a humiliating attempt to crush the poor, here is a solution we should all support. Eradicate poverty, save money, implement a Universal Basic Income.

Burning Down The House of Cards

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?” – Michael Lewis, The Big Short

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Image Credit: Dominic Alves

Rachel Reeves has signalled that she is “open minded” about the banks lobbying her to repeal regulations that came in after the 2008 Financial Crash. If she does, she will be accepting responsibility for the next one the banks inevitably cause.

One of the most important films dealing with the financial sector since the 2008 Financial Crash was 2015’s The Big Short. Comedic, irreverent and outright scathing of those involved, yet it remains one of the most incisive explanations of the 2008 Financial Crash and it managed to make the intentionally obscure world of financial alchemy accessible to the lay person. I’d go as far to say that it did for the idea of ‘sustainable investment banking’ as the films Threads and The Day After did for the idea of a “survivable nuclear war”.

If you haven’t seen it, please do so and pay particular attention to the scene explaining the concept of “synthetic CDOs” – where investors could effectively gamble on the possibility of you defaulting on your mortgage, and other investors could gamble on whether or not those investors will win their bet, and more investors could gamble on the outcome of those bets…all without knowing anything at all about your finances and the state of your mortgage.

One of the things that made these ‘financial instruments’ so destructive was that the ‘investment’ side of the banking sector – the bit that involves people effectively gambling amongst themselves with money that maybe was theirs and maybe wasn’t – was entirely leveraged on the ‘retail’ side of the banking sector – that’s the bit where you put money in your savings account and ask the bank for a mortgage to buy a house – but was completely divorced from it to the point that one side didn’t understand what the other side was doing.

When the housing boom of the early 2000s came to an end in late 2007 and people started defaulting on mortgages, this would have normally been tragic for those losing their homes and a sign of a substantial economic recession but would have ultimately resulted in a bounce back. But all of those ‘investment firms’ sitting on top of the sector were gambling with money that they ‘knew’ was ‘safe’ (because ‘safe as houses’) despite the houses not being nearly as safe as people assumed.

Not just assumed. The way the CDOs were structured made it functionally impossible for anyone to actually assess the risk of their failure. Because it was impossible to work how and if they might fail, the credit agencies declared them to be safe (yes, really) which encouraged banks to pile money into them.

It got so bad that the investment sector was gambling with something like $20 for every $1 actually involved in the mortgages. The investment gambling sector was many times larger than the value of thing they were gambling on. The liabilities on the banks ‘if’ their sure bet failed reached the point of being larger than the GDP of the countries they were based in.

It would only take a small increase in the percentage of mortgage defaults to utterly bankrupt the banks. An increase that might be caused by investment bankers encouraging retails bankers to take on ever riskier mortgages (with ever higher profit margins), paying exorbitant bonuses to bankers who could sell larger and larger mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay them.

Which is what happened. And the backlash threatened to pull down other sectors of the economy because the bankers weren’t just gambling on mortgages but on everything just about up to and including whether or not the sky was blue and the fact that the investment wings were entwined with their retails wings meant that if their investment bank failed, the ATMs on the high streets could be shut down too (runs on banks like Northern Rock showed the visceral reality of people faced with losing their savings because of someone else’s mistakes).

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